Essay On The Cult Of Domesticity

According to the ideals of "the Cult of of True Womanhood" which was also called the "The Cult of Domesticity " women were supposed to hold to perfect virtue in all senses. The women who followed these standards tended to be generally literate and lived in the northeast, particularly New York and Massachusetts. Women were put in the center of the domestic living and were expected to fulfill the roles of a calm and nurturing and supportive mother, a loving and faithful wife, and a passive, delicate, and virtuous creature. They women were also expected to be pious and religious, and expected to unfailingly inspire and support their husbands.
True Women were to hold the four virtues: 1. Piety – believed to be more religious and spiritual than men 2. Purity – pure in heart,
Or maybe not parenting, but certainly child caretaking. Also, because of the expected behaviors woman were assumed to make better teachers and thus one of the first out of home jobs for women was teaching. People of the nineteenth century, both men and women, did not consider what women did as wives and mothers as work but as an expression of their feminine natures.
After the rise of feminism and the fight for women's rights, the cult of domesticity arose again in the 1950s when tv began to present shows that depicted fictional families where the mother would stay at home and care for the house and children while the man went to work. It was as though the media was participating in the brainwashing to keep women "in their place". They would certainly try to guilt them into it at every turn.
Women's bodies did not belong to them. Contraception, and abortion were both illegal. An unmarried woman could own property, make a contract, or sue and be sued. But a married woman, gave up her name, and virtually all her property came under her husband's